Someday I'll Soar
by Toboe LoneWolf
Summary: Tenten's arrows fly with feathers the Hyuuga clip to keep their birds from flying. One-shot


_Summary:_ Tenten's arrows fly with feathers the Hyuuga clip to keep their birds from flying.  
_A/N:_ Prompt "dove" for the 12 days of Nejiten challenge, and also a gift-fic for _tanya lilac_ on LJ, for getting me the song that inspired this fic. Slightly edited from the original. I'm actually kind of proud of this one; like my "Falling Flight" fic it links a lot of things together. On a different note, I like to imagine that the atrocity of a bow Tenten used in the filler episodes never existed, and instead she used a properly outfitted recurve bow. The fletching, however, is still white. _(wink)_

* * *

**Someday I'll Soar**

_Someday I'll fly  
Someday I'll soar  
Someday I'll be so damn much more  
_—John Mayer, "Bigger Than My Body"

Tenten bent closer to her workshop table, carefully aligning the knob so that the lines matched up perfectly. There. Humming to herself, she clamped the feather into its holder, gave it a twist, swiped a line of glue on with her left finger and carefully snapped the feather in place.

Fletching an arrow by hand, feather one complete.

As the glue dried and hardened – which wouldn't take too long; a few seconds – Tenten reached over to the feather pile and picked up another feather she'd prepared earlier. She fingered it, the feather barbs bending underneath. To tell the truth, she would rather have chosen turkey feathers – stiffer, longer, not so fluffy – but these feathers had special significance.

These were dove feathers, given to her by Neji, from the Hyuuga's aerie.

Testing the feather on the fletching jib, Tenten saw that the glue had hardened well enough. Spinning it around, she aligned the jib pieces for the next feather.

The Hyuuga family always had a longtime association with birds. There was, of course, the infamous Bird in the Cage curse seal, but bird-watching and falconry were also traditional Hyuuga past-times with the Byakugan and its far-seeing ability. The birds raised by Hyuuga breeders were highly prized and sought for; many of Konoha's messenger birds came from the Hyuuga's aeries. A low-ranking Hyuuga shinobi would often be outposted to the messenger stations for Konoha's messenger birds, being able to see incoming messenger birds much sooner and with more accuracy than a shinobi with normal eyesight. Birds and the Hyuuga were inexplicitly intertwined, in both reality and in metaphor.

The birds the Hyuuga kept were elegant and beautiful. Beautiful in their expression, for the pet birds; beautiful in their deadliness, for the falcons. It was not uncommon to see a flock of pet birds flying free in a courtyard of the Hyuuga compound.

Placing the next feather into its clamp and applying glue along its lip, Tenten set in the second feather. With a quick touch of her finger she flipped the lock on, making sure that the feather would not tilt or the jig accidentally rotate.

It was a sort of irony that the Hyuuga allowed pet birds to fly free in their compound. Birds – or rather, pet birds – were only allowed that freedom when their wings were clipped. Otherwise they'd fly clear over the walls and cease to be a pet any longer. It was also a sort of irony that the Branch family was often relegated to the task of wing clipping – as if they needed more drilled lessons that they were the sealed members of the clan, unable to fly free of their fate.

Or so Hyuuga tradition goes.

Tenten sighted down the shaft of the arrow, making sure the feathers were being spaced correctly. Then she picked up the last, third feather, clamped it, put glue on and placed it in the fletching jig. Arrow one fletching, preliminarily complete.

With that she picked up a new, unprepared feather, and with careful snips of her scissors she shaped it into proper fletching. Split it carefully down the middle of the quill and discard the smaller half, as these were flight feathers; file the quill down and then cut out the shape. She was using parabolic fletching this time. They went slightly faster, and these arrows were not going to hold broadheads, so there was lesser need for back-end stabilization.

It had started with an out of the blue gift, actually. That Tenten cared for all of her weapons was commonplace knowledge, but Tenten didn't handcraft most of her weapons – metalworking took time and a lot of material, and Tenten would rather spend it on more training or more weaponry. So it was a bit of a surprise when Tenten casually had told her teammates that she needed to fletch some more arrows.

Tenten smiled, lowering her recurve bow. She'd finally figured out how to store a bow in her scrolls while strung. Keeping a bow strung all the time weakened the bow, which was part of the problem in sealing them in scrolls. The natural state of storage was being unstrung, but stringing a bow in mid-battle was problematic.

She didn't have to reseal this bow again now though. Carefully she set it down and with a quick flex of her muscles she unstrung her bow. "Now that I can keep a bow in scroll form, I'll have to make a lot more arrows."

"You make your own arrows?" Neji said, raising an eyebrow. "You don't buy them?"

Tenten shook her head. "Too expensive; it's cheaper to craft them from the raw materials. And I don't like how most of the ones in shops use plastic vanes. Too stiff for my tastes. I like using real feathers."

The next day, Neji had awkwardly held out a wrapped bundle. They were feathers, Neji answered when Tenten, being confused, had asked what it was. From the Hyuuga birds, he elaborated. Doves.

"The Hyuuga clip their birds' wings…"

And Neji's eyes had clouded over with a faint longing. A bit of wistfulness, too. And Tenten didn't have the heart to tell him that dove feathers weren't good for fletching arrows.

She was a weapons mistress. She could compensate for them.

And she did. The next mission, the five shinobi sent to thwart them found five arrows in their chests, with white fletching that came from a dove.

Also ironic, Tenten knew, since doves were a symbol of peace. But such was shinobi life.

Neji continued to supply her with feathers. Whenever he did so, Tenten could see some sort of release, some small easing of pain. She didn't use them on arrows she planned on using for assassination – she continued to use turkey feathers for those, and the Hyuuga did not keep turkeys – but she kept fletching her arrows with the feathers Neji gave her.

Once, he had picked up one of her arrows, and lightly fingered the soft edges of the feathering at the end.

"Do they fly well?" he asked.

"Straight and true," she answered, and that was the truth.

A clipped bird had no vertical flight. They were unable to fly up and over the walls enclosing the compound, and if on the chance they were brought up to the walls and glided off, they were unable to get very far. They became more reliant on their owners, and arguably more tractable.

But still, they were left unable to truly fly, and Tenten knew that this pained Neji.

Having made the next set of fletched feathers, Tenten checked the arrow still in the fletching jig. The glue had dried properly and it looked like the arrow was finished. She released the arrow from the jib, sighting down its end and rotating it, giving it one last check.

Yes, this arrow was good. They would fly, straight and true and deadly from her hand, regardless of the fact that the feathers came from clipped Hyuuga doves meant to keep them grounded.

Through her, those birds – and Neji – would soar.


End file.
